God Help the Amish

I am writing this post from Barnes and Noble because the internet is out at our house. The power has been out for 3 whole days and is finally back on. It has been a crazy time trying to figure out what to do, but it also has shown me a few things.

The first day it was actually fun. My family had planned on going camping this past weekend, but due to some issues we ended up not going. So, this was like camping in our own house. We broke out the candles and made a pizza on the grill (which is somehow way more amazing than in an oven. Try it.) After the storm my sister and I went out on a picture taking excursion, taking action shots of all the fallen trees and debris like reports. We then went down to the beach after it got dark. The lake bathed in moonlight from an almost full moon was so amazingly beautiful, and it was almost completely dark because no one had power (except for those schmucks with generators). The only light was the moon, and it made the water sparkle like glitter. It was a sight that I was thoroughly thankful for. That night I had washed my hair with water bottles, which seemed to work fine, but seemed like it would be difficult with only a flashlight. 

By day two my family was getting fed up with the power outage. My only concern was taking a shower and completing homework online, because I was at work all day. The task of trying to figure out how to bathe myself, finish French homework and eat dinner all at the same time made for a stressful night. I headed over to Panera to complete two of those tasks, but was further stressed by how packed it was. Everyone was there charging their phones, computers and sharing their power outage stories. This made me really think about people in hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters who don't have power or running water for months. And here we are flipping out over a few days without Facebook and air conditioning. 

I'm actually happy when stuff like this happens. Not only does it spice things up a bit, but it puts us in places where we actually have to problem solve and make an effort instead of just moving through life. It brings out the true colors of people, and sometimes they're colors that we need to get rid of. I shocked myself by having the sudden urge to flip off the Com Ed guys as I was driving by. It actually made me laugh. Because they worked for the electrical company, I automatically placed the blame on them when they were actually working to help the problem. In our society we're raised to blame others for everything, and I'm thankful for opportunities to weed out these unfortunate tendencies in my own life.

Here are some pictures from the storm:

A tree that fell at the beach.

A willow lying across Rt 31

Our janky portapotty.